WoG 0014 - Walls Of Genius - White Cassette
A 90 minute cassette officially attributed to multiple bands all of which were later considered the "band" Walls Of Genius. Originally released in spray-painted white with only the legend "Walls Of Genius" stamped.
DAMNED FOR ALL TIME (Evan Cantor, David Lichtenberg) - recorded Monday, January 23, 1984
HARDLY DISGUISED CONTEMPT (EC, DL) - Monday, January 2, 1984
RED ED (Ed Fowler) - recorded on cassette boombox at Ed's house in Denver
THE DENVER BRONCOS (EC, DL) - Sunday, November 27, 1983
GORE A CAT (EC, DL) - Sunday, January 8, 1984
THE DUELING DIMWITS (EC, DL)
JOE COLORADO (EC)
THE BUG SMASHERS (EC, DL, EF) - Saturday, December 10, 1983
THE DRY HEAVES (EC, Brad Carton, DL, EF, Leo Goya) - Sunday, January 15, 1984
The material on White Cassette was recorded in on 4-track reel to reel, at the Hall Of Genius, 2473 20th Street, Boulder, except as noted otherwise.
DAMNED FOR ALL TIME (Evan Cantor, David Lichtenberg) - recorded Monday, January 23, 1984
HARDLY DISGUISED CONTEMPT (EC, DL) - Monday, January 2, 1984
RED ED (Ed Fowler) - recorded on cassette boombox at Ed's house in Denver
THE DENVER BRONCOS (EC, DL) - Sunday, November 27, 1983
GORE A CAT (EC, DL) - Sunday, January 8, 1984
THE DUELING DIMWITS (EC, DL)
JOE COLORADO (EC)
THE BUG SMASHERS (EC, DL, EF) - Saturday, December 10, 1983
THE DRY HEAVES (EC, Brad Carton, DL, EF, Leo Goya) - Sunday, January 15, 1984
The material on White Cassette was recorded in on 4-track reel to reel, at the Hall Of Genius, 2473 20th Street, Boulder, except as noted otherwise.
Evan Cantor:
The album title is an obvious Beatles reference. The Beatles’ so-called White Album (actually titled The Beatles) was in many ways a very powerful influence on the Walls Of Genius approach. Consider the combination of ballads (“Julia”, “Cry Baby Cry”), rockers (“Revolution”, “Helter Skelter”), tongue-in-cheek comedic tunes (“Piggies”, “Back In The U.S.S.R.”) and pure experimentation (“Revolution #9”). There’s an eclecticism worthy of the genial Genii themselves and we were pursuing all of these genres in our own way. So it made perfect sense to issue our “own” White Album, albeit a White Cassette.
The group name Damned For All Time comes from a song in “Jesus Christ Superstar”. Hardly Disguised Contempt is descriptive, in some ways, of the approach we were taking with the tunes. Red Ed was our nickname for Ed Fowler, referring to his ruddy complexion. We would have liked to elicit more of this kind of thing from Ed and I was attempting to create a third persona in the band to complement Little Fyodor and Joe Colorado. The Denver Broncos is named in honor of the fact that it’s a Denver Broncos football game in the background. I don’t know where the names Gore A Cat and The Dry Heaves came from. Dueling Dimwits was a name I came up with specifically for the tune itself, which featured me (Evan) playing duel lead guitar, not always proficiently. Joe Colorado was my (Evan) alternate nom de plume for solo stuff with Walls Of Genius. I also performed as Joe Colorado at open stage at Pachamama’s Coffee House in those days. The Bug Smashers could have been mine or Ed’s name for the group. We were all bug smashers of one sort or another in our childhoods. All of this music was recorded in December 1983 and January 1984. We were also performing with and recording Architects Office during this period.
I spray-painted the cassette boxes white for this release and got a little rubber stamp that said “Walls Of Genius”, so it would look (almost) just like the Beatles’ so-called White Album. I believe this particular joke has been made by many bands since, but WoG may have been the first. Maybe not. My memory is that I spray-painted the cassette tapes white as well, but I do not have a surviving dub, only the master from which the dubs were made.
Little Fyodor (David Lichtenberg):
I think of The White Cassette as something of a transition between our early period and our late period. For one thing, it was our last tape (well except for Most Embarrassing Moments, which wasn’t a “serious” release) to apply individual “band names” to each ostensible session. For another, the first side featured many pieces built up by overdubbing and which were predominately attributable to one band member or another, techniques we largely turned to on our later tapes. We thought we were really taking off with this one when we got our best review yet (and maybe ever?) in Unsound magazine where we were called “the new sound terrorists of America”!! Of course you know where the album title comes from; you’re supposed to! We thought we were pretty clever about that. Little did we know that The Residents released something they called The White Single around the same time! I can’t say for sure which came first…. Evan spray-painted the whole outside of the cassette box white and then we rubber stamped “Walls of Genius” on it!
EC:
The insert had pictures of cowboy-western items from a children’s book on one side and images of fire-engines on the other. This was either subconsciously or consciously an effort to reflect the kind of child-like lack-of-inhibition and spontaneity that we were getting with our music.
This release continues the trend that first got started with “Voodoo Queen” on The WoG Sampler!. We were experimenting more aggressively with putting tracks together via overdubbing on the 4-track. There was a great deal more overdubbing involved in creating the tracks on this release. We were also experimenting with a kind of thematic presentation. Side A was essentially a “silly side”, featuring cover tunes and demented originals. Side B was all improvisation, plus the overdubbed tapes that I mixed in after the fact. It wasn’t our first foray into this kind of segregation, as Cultural Sabotage had been a self-consciously silly release, while Little Victor Meets Violent Vince was more serious, or at the very least, reflected our improv side. For the White Cassette, we segregated the material on side 1 and side 2 respectively.
The album title is an obvious Beatles reference. The Beatles’ so-called White Album (actually titled The Beatles) was in many ways a very powerful influence on the Walls Of Genius approach. Consider the combination of ballads (“Julia”, “Cry Baby Cry”), rockers (“Revolution”, “Helter Skelter”), tongue-in-cheek comedic tunes (“Piggies”, “Back In The U.S.S.R.”) and pure experimentation (“Revolution #9”). There’s an eclecticism worthy of the genial Genii themselves and we were pursuing all of these genres in our own way. So it made perfect sense to issue our “own” White Album, albeit a White Cassette.
The group name Damned For All Time comes from a song in “Jesus Christ Superstar”. Hardly Disguised Contempt is descriptive, in some ways, of the approach we were taking with the tunes. Red Ed was our nickname for Ed Fowler, referring to his ruddy complexion. We would have liked to elicit more of this kind of thing from Ed and I was attempting to create a third persona in the band to complement Little Fyodor and Joe Colorado. The Denver Broncos is named in honor of the fact that it’s a Denver Broncos football game in the background. I don’t know where the names Gore A Cat and The Dry Heaves came from. Dueling Dimwits was a name I came up with specifically for the tune itself, which featured me (Evan) playing duel lead guitar, not always proficiently. Joe Colorado was my (Evan) alternate nom de plume for solo stuff with Walls Of Genius. I also performed as Joe Colorado at open stage at Pachamama’s Coffee House in those days. The Bug Smashers could have been mine or Ed’s name for the group. We were all bug smashers of one sort or another in our childhoods. All of this music was recorded in December 1983 and January 1984. We were also performing with and recording Architects Office during this period.
I spray-painted the cassette boxes white for this release and got a little rubber stamp that said “Walls Of Genius”, so it would look (almost) just like the Beatles’ so-called White Album. I believe this particular joke has been made by many bands since, but WoG may have been the first. Maybe not. My memory is that I spray-painted the cassette tapes white as well, but I do not have a surviving dub, only the master from which the dubs were made.
Little Fyodor (David Lichtenberg):
I think of The White Cassette as something of a transition between our early period and our late period. For one thing, it was our last tape (well except for Most Embarrassing Moments, which wasn’t a “serious” release) to apply individual “band names” to each ostensible session. For another, the first side featured many pieces built up by overdubbing and which were predominately attributable to one band member or another, techniques we largely turned to on our later tapes. We thought we were really taking off with this one when we got our best review yet (and maybe ever?) in Unsound magazine where we were called “the new sound terrorists of America”!! Of course you know where the album title comes from; you’re supposed to! We thought we were pretty clever about that. Little did we know that The Residents released something they called The White Single around the same time! I can’t say for sure which came first…. Evan spray-painted the whole outside of the cassette box white and then we rubber stamped “Walls of Genius” on it!
EC:
The insert had pictures of cowboy-western items from a children’s book on one side and images of fire-engines on the other. This was either subconsciously or consciously an effort to reflect the kind of child-like lack-of-inhibition and spontaneity that we were getting with our music.
This release continues the trend that first got started with “Voodoo Queen” on The WoG Sampler!. We were experimenting more aggressively with putting tracks together via overdubbing on the 4-track. There was a great deal more overdubbing involved in creating the tracks on this release. We were also experimenting with a kind of thematic presentation. Side A was essentially a “silly side”, featuring cover tunes and demented originals. Side B was all improvisation, plus the overdubbed tapes that I mixed in after the fact. It wasn’t our first foray into this kind of segregation, as Cultural Sabotage had been a self-consciously silly release, while Little Victor Meets Violent Vince was more serious, or at the very least, reflected our improv side. For the White Cassette, we segregated the material on side 1 and side 2 respectively.
EC:
We thanked Ed Fowler for “manipulated vinyl on ‘Bozos Return'. I don’t know why we didn’t just credit him along with the other items under the song itself.
Scott Childress (described in previous titles) was a friend of mine from the Trust Company of America, my employer at the time. He hung out and partied with us, occasionally shaking a cabasa or tambourine.
Schaun Keenan Gilson was a KGNU dee-jay who interviewed Walls of Genius on the radio.
Brian Ladd, of the Psyclones and Objekt magazine (a fanzine), contributed some faked orgasm recordings used on “I Heard It Through The Grapevine”. He had given us a floppy 45-rpm record of lesbian orgasms. Whether they were real or faked, we would never know, but I have always assumed they were faked.
Bob Forward, of another do-it-yourself underground group The Fundamentalists, provided some sound tapes that I used in mixing “Blue Leos”.
Brad Carton had appeared on previous WoG issues, was the drummer from Rumours of Marriage with Evan and Ed, and was currently the drummer for Denver punk rockers The Lepers.
We thanked Ed Fowler for “manipulated vinyl on ‘Bozos Return'. I don’t know why we didn’t just credit him along with the other items under the song itself.
Scott Childress (described in previous titles) was a friend of mine from the Trust Company of America, my employer at the time. He hung out and partied with us, occasionally shaking a cabasa or tambourine.
Schaun Keenan Gilson was a KGNU dee-jay who interviewed Walls of Genius on the radio.
Brian Ladd, of the Psyclones and Objekt magazine (a fanzine), contributed some faked orgasm recordings used on “I Heard It Through The Grapevine”. He had given us a floppy 45-rpm record of lesbian orgasms. Whether they were real or faked, we would never know, but I have always assumed they were faked.
Bob Forward, of another do-it-yourself underground group The Fundamentalists, provided some sound tapes that I used in mixing “Blue Leos”.
Brad Carton had appeared on previous WoG issues, was the drummer from Rumours of Marriage with Evan and Ed, and was currently the drummer for Denver punk rockers The Lepers.
Side A
Louie, Louie - DAMNED FOR ALL TIME
I'm Falling In Love With Ellen - HARDLY DISGUISED CONTEMPT
Thief's Paradise - HARDLY DISGUISED CONTEMPT
Drunken Hawaiian - HARDLY DISGUISED CONTEMPT
Garbage Blues - RED ED
The Big Snow Blues - THE DENVER BRONCOS
I Heard It Through The Grapevine - GORE A CAT
The Sick Blues / Bozos Return - THE DUELING DIMWITS
Alaska - JOE COLORADO
Fish Sinking - THE BUG SMASHERS
Fish Stinking - THE BUG SMASHERS
Louie, Louie - DAMNED FOR ALL TIME
I'm Falling In Love With Ellen - HARDLY DISGUISED CONTEMPT
Thief's Paradise - HARDLY DISGUISED CONTEMPT
Drunken Hawaiian - HARDLY DISGUISED CONTEMPT
Garbage Blues - RED ED
The Big Snow Blues - THE DENVER BRONCOS
I Heard It Through The Grapevine - GORE A CAT
The Sick Blues / Bozos Return - THE DUELING DIMWITS
Alaska - JOE COLORADO
Fish Sinking - THE BUG SMASHERS
Fish Stinking - THE BUG SMASHERS
“Louie Louie” (Damned For All Time)
LF:
Side A starts off with a couple of unlisted things, Evan reading a mock language advisory, patterned on the text of the one available in the KGNU broadcast studio (Evan no doubt inspired by the controversy surrounding the “Go For It” show that was featured on The Guilt Vs. Time Money Complex), and then mocking the line “damned for all time” from Jesus Christ Superstar while the original plays in the background….
Then we have a demented rendition of “Louie, Louie” on which I programmed the synthesizer to imitate the famous Kingsmen riff, only I got it backwards and programmed a two-beat where there was supposed to be a three-beat and vice versa. Hopefully it sounds intentional – yeah, that’s it, I did that intentionally! Evan croons a mildly wacky vocal while all manner of little percussion objects are overdubbed, some of them household objects, like scissors, if I recall correctly. I do some manic finger tapping on the skin part of the little Jamaican drum after the 2nd verse, and then I think there’s an additional track of the same making it doubly manic. We were kind of taking advantage of how big little things can sound when recorded right up to the mike and how many of them could be crammed in on a four-track recording. I don’t think Evan knew the drum track was ending when he sang the last line, but it (too?) sounds intentional! We named our “band” for the funny line in the preceding hidden track, but it was beginning to get old to try to name ourselves something new every time we turned on the recording equipment, especially now that Evan and I both lived at our recording studio and we could record stuff at any time, making it a little absurd to think of our recording activities as being divided into distinct events, much less “bands” with distinct names….
EC:
There was a compilation tape getting promoted around this time that was to feature only versions of “Louie Louie” and we were thus motivated. This version opens with Evan’s spoken warning about potentially disturbing content. Then a snippet from Jesus Christ Superstar comes fading in, a voice singing the refrain from “Damned For All Time”. David and I both chime in, “damned! damned for all time!” We were no fans of this particular rock opera and I imagine I speak for both David and I when I say we regarded it as over-baked cornpone. I recall the hype surrounding it in 1970 (“new music for a new decade!”) and I bought into that hype at the time. In 1970, I was only 14 years old and still subject to embracing what the radio told me to embrace. It wasn’t until some years later that I decided Jesus Christ Superstar was the beginning of a god-awful stretch of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals. But considering Andrew Lloyd Webber, at least JCS featured actual songs, as silly and over-cooked in their sincerity as they were, that rocked. I can hardly stomach Webber’s show-music and JCS is the best of a bad bunch. David and I both recalled this song about being “Damned”, so we got into our own kind of personal mocking of damnation. This was followed by the introduction of a nearly-robotic "Louie Louie" riff. It’s obvious that we didn’t know any of the lyrics to “Louie Louie” except the refrain. The first go-round has Evan singing in a laconic, emotionless mode. The second has Evan getting crazed, using a faux-Louis Armstrong voice. I think a stapler was used in getting some of the percussive effect.
“Falling In Love With Ellen” (Hardly Disguised Contempt)
EC:
Ellen was/is David’s cousin. When he and I first came to Boulder, we stayed the night sleeping on her floor in the Bluffs apartments in South Boulder (now renovated and called “Boulder Creek” apartments). As I recall, Ellen was a book salesman, hawking Bibles all across Kansas and spending weekends indulging in Boulder’s ubiquitous 1980s party scene. I don’t think Ellen understood us very well (and vice versa). After that first night in Boulder, I don’t recall ever seeing her again. David is likely still in touch. Like so many of our crazed cover versions, this was, in our own twisted way, both a mocking of her and an homage to her. I wrote this with an open tuning on the guitar, most likely egged on by David. This is perhaps the first appearance of what would later be categorized by us as The Fabulous Pus Tones, an approach characterized by David and I as a duo doing crazed, faux-autistic versions of pop songs. “Ellen” happens to be a demented original and is one of my favorite WoG tracks of all time.
LF:
In league with what I said above, the Hardly Disguised Contempt recordings were not really all made in one recording session, though it appears that two of the songs were at least started the same day the other one was completed (a rare case of an overdub sessions getting a date assigned to it, probably for this very reason!), so, yeah, you could tie it together as being the same “band,” though, again, it was definitely getting a little abstract and arbitrary….
The band name in this case was almost a subtitle for the song, “I’m Falling in Love With Ellen,” a sarcastic love song Evan wrote about my cousin Ellen!! Ellen lived in Boulder at the time and she even put us up when we first rolled into town in August of 1981, but she and Evan didn’t get along. It was largely a cultural differences thing, as Ellen lived in a very different social milieu from us, more mainstream, maybe more materialistic. She listened to Billy Joel! Evan especially hated it when Ellen lavished praise on contrived tourist towns near natural wonders, like Jackson Hole, WY. I could see Evan’s viewpoint up to a point, having trained myself to be scornful of that mainstream stuff, probably at least partly as a defense mechanism to having felt so alienated from it. At the same time, Ellen was still my cousin, whom I’d known since I was wee young, when we played kid games together, so I was kind of caught in the middle, in more ways than one…. Anyway, no one twisted my arm, and I helped with the song and partook in the “contempt”, if primarily for the sake of art! Ironically, Evan and Ellen now share the experience of being lymphoma survivors….
Evan plays the chords he wrote on his acoustic guitar and bangs a garbage can lid or something (overdubbed) in the midst of the titular line and we both sing and laugh, though it’s my laughter you mostly hear, described in Evan’s liner notes as “hideous” – I liked doing that kind of thing! Evan has the first part of the call and response section and I have the “with Ellen!” response part.
“Thief’s Paradise” (Hardly Disguised Contempt)
LF:
“Thief’s Paradise” is an instrumental I wrote on my guitar while fooling around on it. I liked what I wrote a lot, but I always hated my playing. I tried, but I just couldn’t do any better, and it sounds badly off kilter in places (and not where it’s supposed to!). I play the bass part on my guitar in addition to the lead part. I programmed a very simple part on my Mattel drum machine and Evan played a mostly simple part on his roto toms in tandem.
EC:
This is David’s solo vehicle with Evan contributing percussion on the roto-toms. David’s got a thumping drum machine going and is playing a bass line and effects lead-guitar. I suspect the lead guitar was the overdubbed part.
“Drunken Hawaiian” (Hardly Disguised Contempt)
EC:
This is Evan’s solo vehicle with David contributing synthesizer swells. I am experimenting with slide guitar on an open tuning for this piece, which has an odd lurching momentum. The synthesizer swells fill out the sound as it moves from part A to part B and back again. The title is a reference to slide-guitar songs such as Santo & Johnny’s “Sleepwalk” that featured Hawaiian slack-key guitar. I thought this sounded like that, only not quite right, therefore ‘drunken’.
LF:
“Drunken Hawaiian” returns to Evan’s pen and he overdubbed multiple guitars and his roto-toms and some little bells, which I think were something I picked up at a museum while visiting the family back east. My one contribution (besides getting the bells) was my synthesizer overdub, of which I was pretty proud.
“Garbage Blues” (Red Ed)
EC:
A rare Ed Fowler solo piece. He’s got the Casio going with its built-in rhythm track and is doing what sounds like beer-fueled scat singing. I very likely titled this piece for the release, drawing on what little intelligible lyric content I could glean from Ed’s vocals.
LF:
I think Ed caught wind of our (Evan and my) home recording ways and was inspired to record the “Garbage Blues” one drunken night on his own ghetto blaster, playing his little Casio keyboard and scatting along on gravelly vocals, all on his own! His first solo piece! As I’ve mentioned in notes to prior tapes, the “bad blues” was a recurring theme for us. This might have been our most unique take on it! Red Ed was a nickname for Ed because of his ruddy complexion….
“Big Snow Blues” (The Denver Broncos)
EC:
It was a snowy day and the Broncos were on the radio. Television reception has always been crappy in Boulder, so we were very likely listening to the game on radio. Either that or we had sound on the television with a garbled picture. The game most likely sucked, as so many Broncos games did in the ‘80s. Even with John Elway at the helm in those days, you never knew from game to game if the Broncos were going to be invincible or play like dog-shit. Fans used to chant for “Kubiak the Maniac”, the backup quarterback, when Elway appeared to have forgotten how to play football. This was most likely one of those days, so we started jamming instead of watching/listening to the game. David channeled his inner Jimi Hendrix, half-singing and half-reciting a bunch of Hendrix lyrics while Evan played a blues progression on the guitar. The game is only very faintly heard in the background. David’s faux-Hendrix is hilarious.
LF:
With some embarrassment I must admit I had no idea I was reading Hendrix lyrics at the time we recorded “The Big Snow Blues.” Evan just handed me a book that had some lyrics in it, and I read them in a way that I thought fit Evan’s bluesy acoustic playing, trying to sound tongue-in-cheek black, I guess (my vocals, I mean). In the background was a radio broadcast of the Denver Broncos losing a game (recorded as we played, unlike the tapes added to The Dry Heaves’ “Blue Leos/Black Hole in the Orifice", see below!). Anyone wanna Google who the Broncos lost to on 11-26-83? (My memory says the Packers!) Anyway, there was a big snow outside and so we just stayed in and did this, trying to capture the feeling of our doing that…. (Hell you could even try Googling how many inches fell that day!) After the tape was released, Evan reported to me that Ed told him that he didn’t like anything about this one! Evan sings some bluesy stuff on the fadeout….
EDITOR'S NOTE: The San Diego Chargers defeated the Broncos 31-7 on Sunday, November 27, 1983.
“I Heard It Through The Grapevine” (Gore A Cat)
EC:
This piece begins with a “hidden track”, some material from an interview Schaun Keenan-Gilson did with David and Evan on KGNU radio. Evan talks about the “ostinato”, which is classical music-speak for a repetitive bass line. David discusses the improvisatory process. They both talk about the party atmosphere and the effort to have fun. Then up comes a recording of presumably fake lesbian orgasms which were on a floppy 45rpm record given to us by Brian Ladd of the Psyclones (Ladd-Frith Music, Eureka CA). The signature riff of "Grapevine" comes in as the lesbian orgasms fade out. The riff goes continuously through verses and chorus. This is another of Evan’s laconic emotionless vocal treatments. Backwards tapes are mixed in, likely on an unused 4th track on the reel-to-reel tape which still had rock music on it. This piece emphasizes the approach we were taking so often. On one hand, we were serious about what we were doing and could discuss it from an academic standpoint. We was college grads, after all! So we stuck the interview in. But we don’t want listeners to think that we took ourselves too seriously, so then we faded up faked lesbian orgasms before launching into a complete deconstruction of the Marvin Gaye hit. I had learned “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” the day that Marvin Gaye died and played it as Joe Colorado that same night at the open stage at Pachamama’s coffee house on Pearl Street (currently a fancy French restaurant, L’Atelier).
LF:
Evan will play an ostinato! Either unlisted or used as an intro to “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” (take your pick), we hear a section of the interview that Schaun Keenan-Gilson did with us as part of a series he was doing on local modern composers or some such for public radio station KGNU. Schaun (I’ll have to take Evan’s liner notes’ word for it on the odd spelling of that name!) later asked me laughingly if there even were such a thing as an ostinato – he thought Evan may have been making it up! But no, this was some serious music-speak from a serious sounding Head Moron! Serious music-speak like describing the band as “trying to figure out just what the hell is going on”! We both sound rather serious answering Schaun’s serious questions, even while describing our approach to music as being predicated on fun, and then just to prove the point, a porn tape comes on to put everything in perspective! Brian Ladd had sent Evan a bunch of porn stuff which Evan found quite hilarious! Some of the S/M pictures Brian sent ended up in our catalogs….
“I Heard It Through the Grapevine” was one of Evan’s biggest hits at his weekly open mike gig, and I recall a tape of him singing it there in which the crowd was all clapping and singing along with him. They even sang the backing vocals that are heard on the Marvin Gaye recording, that’s how much they were into it! We asked Evan if he’d hired them! This rendition took on a subdued and menacing feel, with Evan taking advantage of the more intimate feel you can get in a recording studio, especially one in your own living room. He’s probably singing in a lower register and a quieter voice than he would do live. I programmed the synthesizer to match that feel and then rattled some stuff at the end, apparently antsy to include some mania, in league with the rattling found on “Louie, Louie.” Gore A Cat was probably taken out of context from something someone said. It’s amazing the things people say when they’re taken out of context!
“The Sick Blues/Bozos Return” (Dueling Dimwits)
EC:
Another Evan solo vehicle with David on the drum machine and occasional pounding tom-tom. Strangely compelling, this track prompts the questions ‘Is it good? Is it bad? Is it so bad it’s good?’ It moves back and forth from the ridiculous to the sublime and back again. At the very end, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass are mixed up for a moment and then a tape of a record played backwards by Ed Fowler is mixed up. The Tijuana Brass were on the reel tape and available at the end of my recording of the track, so they just happened to be there, available for the taking. The tape was old and had probably been played a million times before, so the mix-in was a little distorted, just the way we liked it. This was a kind of “found tapes” experience.
LF:
Well, now we’ve made it from the “Garbage Blues” through “The Big Snow Blues” all the way to “The Real Sick Blues”! I know it’s supposed to be grievously unoriginal to use a drum machine’s factory pre-set, but I turned on my Mattel drum machine to its “Rock ‘n’ Roll” setting to hear what it sounded like and Evan liked it and started playing along with it, so that’s what we used! I may have added that one high, fluttery sound, or maybe I changed it from another sound to that. The latter’s probably the case as the device has an adjustable “tom” sound that goes way up high like that (hear more of it on “Fish Stinking”!). Evan gave himself over to the blues, I think overdubbing two lines of blues licks. The “bells” I played were on this instrument I’ve previously called a “three bell” for lack of a better. It was like three cowbells soldered together, and each made a loud, obnoxious ring of varying tones. Someone overdubbed a low roto-tom beat played once each measure in tandem with the first beat of the drum machine, probably an Evan idea, whoever executed it…. This piece was actually rather normal, except for, well, except for sounding real sick! A result I guess of the combination of the cheesy drum machine and my clanky bells and Evan’s tongue-in-check blues playing, which, while very adept in many respects (sure better than I could do!), also displayed some limitation…. (Not that it stopped him!)
Next is an unlisted bit starting off with some Tijuana Brass music (I think) segueing into an off-center playing of a record made by a local nightclub performer named Nunez something (or something Nunez?) that Ed had bought and found that it sounded real crazy when played off-center!
“Alaska” (Joe Colorado)
EC:
This is almost a completely straight song done solo by Evan. The tag-line at the end, “Boulder, the only city where you can afford to be conspicuously poor” was never used again. The song was my paean to the climate in Boulder and we would revisit it in a party atmosphere on a subsequent release.
LF:
“Alaska” was Evan’s ode to the state of the same name, inspired by our correspondence and interaction with Warning Magazine from Alaska. I remember Evan reporting that Ed cracked up upon hearing this and said that it sounded authentic, and I wondered, well, why wasn’t it authentic, as Evan was as sincere a folkie as any when the mood struck! This is a solo composition and recording by Evan which is mostly a silly ode to Alaska’s weather but ends with a bit of bitter commentary about how Evan saw himself viewed in Boulder society!!
“Fish Sinking” (The Bug Smashers)
EC:
“Fish Rising” was the name of an album by Steve Hillage, one of Ed Fowler’s guitar gods. Hillage was a part of the psychedelic Canterbury scene in England (along with Pink Floyd and the marijuana-soaked hippie improv band, Gong). On this track, Ed is on keyboards, Evan is on lead guitar and there’s a lot of dueling between David on the synth and Ed on the keys. When it quiets down toward the end, you can hear Evan creating a rhythm by tapping the electric guitar so that the strings hum and vibrate.
LF:
The Bug Smashers session was just some deliriously delightful completely free improvisation we came up with one night! I seem to remember just sitting around, hanging out at the Hall Of Genius when we just started turning things on and started playing and recording. It hadn’t been planned! It might all be one continuous jam originally, edited into two separate and arbitrarily-named pieces, though the change of instruments suggests downtime, but it may have been done on the fly, while someone else was still playing. When I say “arbitrarily-named,” I mean as separate pieces. The names are obviously (to us!) references to the Fish Rising record by Steve Hillage, a big influence on Ed’s guitar playing. The liner notes tell you what everyone was doing, but I’ll mention that the keys played by Ed on each piece was his little Casio. On “Fish Sinking,” he played it as an actual keyboard, whereas…
“Fish Stinking” (The Bug Smashers)
LF:
…on “Fish Stinking,” Ed gets keyboard credit for programming the arpeggiated rhythm that flows from the Casio throughout like a drum machine. In reverse fashion to that, I played my drum machine in a non-programmed, ongoing style. It had buttons on it you could press to get sounds out of it in real time, and there was another mechanism for controlling the speed at which the beats arrived. Through manipulating these features plus the adjustable tom I mentioned above (for “The Real Sick Blues”), I got to “play” this drum machine in an ongoing manner and get some crazy, manic sounds out of it! I really felt like taking things to an extreme that night, albeit in the limited, wacky ways at my disposal. But with everyone else going crazy too, it all came together! Ed was playing Evan’s guitar (maybe he hadn’t brought his own?), giving his playing a little different sound and feel than usual. (And Evan’s “Toms” were his usual roto tom kit….) It had to end somewhere, so an abrupt ending was as good as any, in contrast to the suddenly calm fadeout of “Fish Sinking”….
EC:
This one is Ed’s chance to shine. Evan and David are doing live and electronic percussion respectively while Ed wails away on Evan’s SG guitar. The sound is the same as from “Fish Sinking”, but the playing is different. Did we get Ed to overdub synth or keyboard stuff? It sure sounds like it, but maybe he had the Casio going. The track achieves a nice intensity and cuts-off at the end of the tape.
LF:
Side A starts off with a couple of unlisted things, Evan reading a mock language advisory, patterned on the text of the one available in the KGNU broadcast studio (Evan no doubt inspired by the controversy surrounding the “Go For It” show that was featured on The Guilt Vs. Time Money Complex), and then mocking the line “damned for all time” from Jesus Christ Superstar while the original plays in the background….
Then we have a demented rendition of “Louie, Louie” on which I programmed the synthesizer to imitate the famous Kingsmen riff, only I got it backwards and programmed a two-beat where there was supposed to be a three-beat and vice versa. Hopefully it sounds intentional – yeah, that’s it, I did that intentionally! Evan croons a mildly wacky vocal while all manner of little percussion objects are overdubbed, some of them household objects, like scissors, if I recall correctly. I do some manic finger tapping on the skin part of the little Jamaican drum after the 2nd verse, and then I think there’s an additional track of the same making it doubly manic. We were kind of taking advantage of how big little things can sound when recorded right up to the mike and how many of them could be crammed in on a four-track recording. I don’t think Evan knew the drum track was ending when he sang the last line, but it (too?) sounds intentional! We named our “band” for the funny line in the preceding hidden track, but it was beginning to get old to try to name ourselves something new every time we turned on the recording equipment, especially now that Evan and I both lived at our recording studio and we could record stuff at any time, making it a little absurd to think of our recording activities as being divided into distinct events, much less “bands” with distinct names….
EC:
There was a compilation tape getting promoted around this time that was to feature only versions of “Louie Louie” and we were thus motivated. This version opens with Evan’s spoken warning about potentially disturbing content. Then a snippet from Jesus Christ Superstar comes fading in, a voice singing the refrain from “Damned For All Time”. David and I both chime in, “damned! damned for all time!” We were no fans of this particular rock opera and I imagine I speak for both David and I when I say we regarded it as over-baked cornpone. I recall the hype surrounding it in 1970 (“new music for a new decade!”) and I bought into that hype at the time. In 1970, I was only 14 years old and still subject to embracing what the radio told me to embrace. It wasn’t until some years later that I decided Jesus Christ Superstar was the beginning of a god-awful stretch of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals. But considering Andrew Lloyd Webber, at least JCS featured actual songs, as silly and over-cooked in their sincerity as they were, that rocked. I can hardly stomach Webber’s show-music and JCS is the best of a bad bunch. David and I both recalled this song about being “Damned”, so we got into our own kind of personal mocking of damnation. This was followed by the introduction of a nearly-robotic "Louie Louie" riff. It’s obvious that we didn’t know any of the lyrics to “Louie Louie” except the refrain. The first go-round has Evan singing in a laconic, emotionless mode. The second has Evan getting crazed, using a faux-Louis Armstrong voice. I think a stapler was used in getting some of the percussive effect.
“Falling In Love With Ellen” (Hardly Disguised Contempt)
EC:
Ellen was/is David’s cousin. When he and I first came to Boulder, we stayed the night sleeping on her floor in the Bluffs apartments in South Boulder (now renovated and called “Boulder Creek” apartments). As I recall, Ellen was a book salesman, hawking Bibles all across Kansas and spending weekends indulging in Boulder’s ubiquitous 1980s party scene. I don’t think Ellen understood us very well (and vice versa). After that first night in Boulder, I don’t recall ever seeing her again. David is likely still in touch. Like so many of our crazed cover versions, this was, in our own twisted way, both a mocking of her and an homage to her. I wrote this with an open tuning on the guitar, most likely egged on by David. This is perhaps the first appearance of what would later be categorized by us as The Fabulous Pus Tones, an approach characterized by David and I as a duo doing crazed, faux-autistic versions of pop songs. “Ellen” happens to be a demented original and is one of my favorite WoG tracks of all time.
LF:
In league with what I said above, the Hardly Disguised Contempt recordings were not really all made in one recording session, though it appears that two of the songs were at least started the same day the other one was completed (a rare case of an overdub sessions getting a date assigned to it, probably for this very reason!), so, yeah, you could tie it together as being the same “band,” though, again, it was definitely getting a little abstract and arbitrary….
The band name in this case was almost a subtitle for the song, “I’m Falling in Love With Ellen,” a sarcastic love song Evan wrote about my cousin Ellen!! Ellen lived in Boulder at the time and she even put us up when we first rolled into town in August of 1981, but she and Evan didn’t get along. It was largely a cultural differences thing, as Ellen lived in a very different social milieu from us, more mainstream, maybe more materialistic. She listened to Billy Joel! Evan especially hated it when Ellen lavished praise on contrived tourist towns near natural wonders, like Jackson Hole, WY. I could see Evan’s viewpoint up to a point, having trained myself to be scornful of that mainstream stuff, probably at least partly as a defense mechanism to having felt so alienated from it. At the same time, Ellen was still my cousin, whom I’d known since I was wee young, when we played kid games together, so I was kind of caught in the middle, in more ways than one…. Anyway, no one twisted my arm, and I helped with the song and partook in the “contempt”, if primarily for the sake of art! Ironically, Evan and Ellen now share the experience of being lymphoma survivors….
Evan plays the chords he wrote on his acoustic guitar and bangs a garbage can lid or something (overdubbed) in the midst of the titular line and we both sing and laugh, though it’s my laughter you mostly hear, described in Evan’s liner notes as “hideous” – I liked doing that kind of thing! Evan has the first part of the call and response section and I have the “with Ellen!” response part.
“Thief’s Paradise” (Hardly Disguised Contempt)
LF:
“Thief’s Paradise” is an instrumental I wrote on my guitar while fooling around on it. I liked what I wrote a lot, but I always hated my playing. I tried, but I just couldn’t do any better, and it sounds badly off kilter in places (and not where it’s supposed to!). I play the bass part on my guitar in addition to the lead part. I programmed a very simple part on my Mattel drum machine and Evan played a mostly simple part on his roto toms in tandem.
EC:
This is David’s solo vehicle with Evan contributing percussion on the roto-toms. David’s got a thumping drum machine going and is playing a bass line and effects lead-guitar. I suspect the lead guitar was the overdubbed part.
“Drunken Hawaiian” (Hardly Disguised Contempt)
EC:
This is Evan’s solo vehicle with David contributing synthesizer swells. I am experimenting with slide guitar on an open tuning for this piece, which has an odd lurching momentum. The synthesizer swells fill out the sound as it moves from part A to part B and back again. The title is a reference to slide-guitar songs such as Santo & Johnny’s “Sleepwalk” that featured Hawaiian slack-key guitar. I thought this sounded like that, only not quite right, therefore ‘drunken’.
LF:
“Drunken Hawaiian” returns to Evan’s pen and he overdubbed multiple guitars and his roto-toms and some little bells, which I think were something I picked up at a museum while visiting the family back east. My one contribution (besides getting the bells) was my synthesizer overdub, of which I was pretty proud.
“Garbage Blues” (Red Ed)
EC:
A rare Ed Fowler solo piece. He’s got the Casio going with its built-in rhythm track and is doing what sounds like beer-fueled scat singing. I very likely titled this piece for the release, drawing on what little intelligible lyric content I could glean from Ed’s vocals.
LF:
I think Ed caught wind of our (Evan and my) home recording ways and was inspired to record the “Garbage Blues” one drunken night on his own ghetto blaster, playing his little Casio keyboard and scatting along on gravelly vocals, all on his own! His first solo piece! As I’ve mentioned in notes to prior tapes, the “bad blues” was a recurring theme for us. This might have been our most unique take on it! Red Ed was a nickname for Ed because of his ruddy complexion….
“Big Snow Blues” (The Denver Broncos)
EC:
It was a snowy day and the Broncos were on the radio. Television reception has always been crappy in Boulder, so we were very likely listening to the game on radio. Either that or we had sound on the television with a garbled picture. The game most likely sucked, as so many Broncos games did in the ‘80s. Even with John Elway at the helm in those days, you never knew from game to game if the Broncos were going to be invincible or play like dog-shit. Fans used to chant for “Kubiak the Maniac”, the backup quarterback, when Elway appeared to have forgotten how to play football. This was most likely one of those days, so we started jamming instead of watching/listening to the game. David channeled his inner Jimi Hendrix, half-singing and half-reciting a bunch of Hendrix lyrics while Evan played a blues progression on the guitar. The game is only very faintly heard in the background. David’s faux-Hendrix is hilarious.
LF:
With some embarrassment I must admit I had no idea I was reading Hendrix lyrics at the time we recorded “The Big Snow Blues.” Evan just handed me a book that had some lyrics in it, and I read them in a way that I thought fit Evan’s bluesy acoustic playing, trying to sound tongue-in-cheek black, I guess (my vocals, I mean). In the background was a radio broadcast of the Denver Broncos losing a game (recorded as we played, unlike the tapes added to The Dry Heaves’ “Blue Leos/Black Hole in the Orifice", see below!). Anyone wanna Google who the Broncos lost to on 11-26-83? (My memory says the Packers!) Anyway, there was a big snow outside and so we just stayed in and did this, trying to capture the feeling of our doing that…. (Hell you could even try Googling how many inches fell that day!) After the tape was released, Evan reported to me that Ed told him that he didn’t like anything about this one! Evan sings some bluesy stuff on the fadeout….
EDITOR'S NOTE: The San Diego Chargers defeated the Broncos 31-7 on Sunday, November 27, 1983.
“I Heard It Through The Grapevine” (Gore A Cat)
EC:
This piece begins with a “hidden track”, some material from an interview Schaun Keenan-Gilson did with David and Evan on KGNU radio. Evan talks about the “ostinato”, which is classical music-speak for a repetitive bass line. David discusses the improvisatory process. They both talk about the party atmosphere and the effort to have fun. Then up comes a recording of presumably fake lesbian orgasms which were on a floppy 45rpm record given to us by Brian Ladd of the Psyclones (Ladd-Frith Music, Eureka CA). The signature riff of "Grapevine" comes in as the lesbian orgasms fade out. The riff goes continuously through verses and chorus. This is another of Evan’s laconic emotionless vocal treatments. Backwards tapes are mixed in, likely on an unused 4th track on the reel-to-reel tape which still had rock music on it. This piece emphasizes the approach we were taking so often. On one hand, we were serious about what we were doing and could discuss it from an academic standpoint. We was college grads, after all! So we stuck the interview in. But we don’t want listeners to think that we took ourselves too seriously, so then we faded up faked lesbian orgasms before launching into a complete deconstruction of the Marvin Gaye hit. I had learned “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” the day that Marvin Gaye died and played it as Joe Colorado that same night at the open stage at Pachamama’s coffee house on Pearl Street (currently a fancy French restaurant, L’Atelier).
LF:
Evan will play an ostinato! Either unlisted or used as an intro to “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” (take your pick), we hear a section of the interview that Schaun Keenan-Gilson did with us as part of a series he was doing on local modern composers or some such for public radio station KGNU. Schaun (I’ll have to take Evan’s liner notes’ word for it on the odd spelling of that name!) later asked me laughingly if there even were such a thing as an ostinato – he thought Evan may have been making it up! But no, this was some serious music-speak from a serious sounding Head Moron! Serious music-speak like describing the band as “trying to figure out just what the hell is going on”! We both sound rather serious answering Schaun’s serious questions, even while describing our approach to music as being predicated on fun, and then just to prove the point, a porn tape comes on to put everything in perspective! Brian Ladd had sent Evan a bunch of porn stuff which Evan found quite hilarious! Some of the S/M pictures Brian sent ended up in our catalogs….
“I Heard It Through the Grapevine” was one of Evan’s biggest hits at his weekly open mike gig, and I recall a tape of him singing it there in which the crowd was all clapping and singing along with him. They even sang the backing vocals that are heard on the Marvin Gaye recording, that’s how much they were into it! We asked Evan if he’d hired them! This rendition took on a subdued and menacing feel, with Evan taking advantage of the more intimate feel you can get in a recording studio, especially one in your own living room. He’s probably singing in a lower register and a quieter voice than he would do live. I programmed the synthesizer to match that feel and then rattled some stuff at the end, apparently antsy to include some mania, in league with the rattling found on “Louie, Louie.” Gore A Cat was probably taken out of context from something someone said. It’s amazing the things people say when they’re taken out of context!
“The Sick Blues/Bozos Return” (Dueling Dimwits)
EC:
Another Evan solo vehicle with David on the drum machine and occasional pounding tom-tom. Strangely compelling, this track prompts the questions ‘Is it good? Is it bad? Is it so bad it’s good?’ It moves back and forth from the ridiculous to the sublime and back again. At the very end, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass are mixed up for a moment and then a tape of a record played backwards by Ed Fowler is mixed up. The Tijuana Brass were on the reel tape and available at the end of my recording of the track, so they just happened to be there, available for the taking. The tape was old and had probably been played a million times before, so the mix-in was a little distorted, just the way we liked it. This was a kind of “found tapes” experience.
LF:
Well, now we’ve made it from the “Garbage Blues” through “The Big Snow Blues” all the way to “The Real Sick Blues”! I know it’s supposed to be grievously unoriginal to use a drum machine’s factory pre-set, but I turned on my Mattel drum machine to its “Rock ‘n’ Roll” setting to hear what it sounded like and Evan liked it and started playing along with it, so that’s what we used! I may have added that one high, fluttery sound, or maybe I changed it from another sound to that. The latter’s probably the case as the device has an adjustable “tom” sound that goes way up high like that (hear more of it on “Fish Stinking”!). Evan gave himself over to the blues, I think overdubbing two lines of blues licks. The “bells” I played were on this instrument I’ve previously called a “three bell” for lack of a better. It was like three cowbells soldered together, and each made a loud, obnoxious ring of varying tones. Someone overdubbed a low roto-tom beat played once each measure in tandem with the first beat of the drum machine, probably an Evan idea, whoever executed it…. This piece was actually rather normal, except for, well, except for sounding real sick! A result I guess of the combination of the cheesy drum machine and my clanky bells and Evan’s tongue-in-check blues playing, which, while very adept in many respects (sure better than I could do!), also displayed some limitation…. (Not that it stopped him!)
Next is an unlisted bit starting off with some Tijuana Brass music (I think) segueing into an off-center playing of a record made by a local nightclub performer named Nunez something (or something Nunez?) that Ed had bought and found that it sounded real crazy when played off-center!
“Alaska” (Joe Colorado)
EC:
This is almost a completely straight song done solo by Evan. The tag-line at the end, “Boulder, the only city where you can afford to be conspicuously poor” was never used again. The song was my paean to the climate in Boulder and we would revisit it in a party atmosphere on a subsequent release.
LF:
“Alaska” was Evan’s ode to the state of the same name, inspired by our correspondence and interaction with Warning Magazine from Alaska. I remember Evan reporting that Ed cracked up upon hearing this and said that it sounded authentic, and I wondered, well, why wasn’t it authentic, as Evan was as sincere a folkie as any when the mood struck! This is a solo composition and recording by Evan which is mostly a silly ode to Alaska’s weather but ends with a bit of bitter commentary about how Evan saw himself viewed in Boulder society!!
“Fish Sinking” (The Bug Smashers)
EC:
“Fish Rising” was the name of an album by Steve Hillage, one of Ed Fowler’s guitar gods. Hillage was a part of the psychedelic Canterbury scene in England (along with Pink Floyd and the marijuana-soaked hippie improv band, Gong). On this track, Ed is on keyboards, Evan is on lead guitar and there’s a lot of dueling between David on the synth and Ed on the keys. When it quiets down toward the end, you can hear Evan creating a rhythm by tapping the electric guitar so that the strings hum and vibrate.
LF:
The Bug Smashers session was just some deliriously delightful completely free improvisation we came up with one night! I seem to remember just sitting around, hanging out at the Hall Of Genius when we just started turning things on and started playing and recording. It hadn’t been planned! It might all be one continuous jam originally, edited into two separate and arbitrarily-named pieces, though the change of instruments suggests downtime, but it may have been done on the fly, while someone else was still playing. When I say “arbitrarily-named,” I mean as separate pieces. The names are obviously (to us!) references to the Fish Rising record by Steve Hillage, a big influence on Ed’s guitar playing. The liner notes tell you what everyone was doing, but I’ll mention that the keys played by Ed on each piece was his little Casio. On “Fish Sinking,” he played it as an actual keyboard, whereas…
“Fish Stinking” (The Bug Smashers)
LF:
…on “Fish Stinking,” Ed gets keyboard credit for programming the arpeggiated rhythm that flows from the Casio throughout like a drum machine. In reverse fashion to that, I played my drum machine in a non-programmed, ongoing style. It had buttons on it you could press to get sounds out of it in real time, and there was another mechanism for controlling the speed at which the beats arrived. Through manipulating these features plus the adjustable tom I mentioned above (for “The Real Sick Blues”), I got to “play” this drum machine in an ongoing manner and get some crazy, manic sounds out of it! I really felt like taking things to an extreme that night, albeit in the limited, wacky ways at my disposal. But with everyone else going crazy too, it all came together! Ed was playing Evan’s guitar (maybe he hadn’t brought his own?), giving his playing a little different sound and feel than usual. (And Evan’s “Toms” were his usual roto tom kit….) It had to end somewhere, so an abrupt ending was as good as any, in contrast to the suddenly calm fadeout of “Fish Sinking”….
EC:
This one is Ed’s chance to shine. Evan and David are doing live and electronic percussion respectively while Ed wails away on Evan’s SG guitar. The sound is the same as from “Fish Sinking”, but the playing is different. Did we get Ed to overdub synth or keyboard stuff? It sure sounds like it, but maybe he had the Casio going. The track achieves a nice intensity and cuts-off at the end of the tape.
Side B
All tracks by THE DRY HEAVES
Louie, Louie
Industrial Acoustic
Vacation in Peking
Blue Leos/Black Hole In The Orifice
Bell And Promises
All tracks by THE DRY HEAVES
Louie, Louie
Industrial Acoustic
Vacation in Peking
Blue Leos/Black Hole In The Orifice
Bell And Promises
“Louie Louie” (The Dry Heaves)
LF:
Side B is entirely taken up by The Dry Heaves, which was a day long jam session with the whole gang, as it was at the time. Ed was there and so was Brad Carton, with his trap set. And even Leo Goya too, although he arrived a little late, after we’d already started…. Actually the first song on Side B was a cover, of the same song that starts out Side A, the classic “Louie, Louie.” I think there may have been a call-out to submit to some compilation that would be entirely versions of this song, so no wonder we tried it two entirely different ways! Evan leads the way as usual, this time on rhythm guitar, with the bass overdubbed later. I think I was supposed to sing it but maybe I didn’t come in quickly enough and Evan started singing, which cued me that I must have missed my cue and I picked it up from there! As usual I was trying to be as absurd as possible. I think I hear some voices in the background, which may have been overdubbed.
EC:
This is an actual rock band treatment, replete with Brad Carton on drums. Evan overdubbed bass after the fact. Fyodor is doing the lead vocal, but it’s obvious that we still don’t know any more words beyond the refrain. Nice lead guitar from Ed on this rockin’ track. The entire second side of the cassette is from one session with The Dry Heaves. This is the presumably “serious side” of the band, or at least the improvisatory side.
“Industrial Acoustic” (TDH)
EC:
Evan leads this with acoustic rhythm guitar. Brad Carton plays lead on synthesizer while David thumps away on the drums. Brad goes wild with the synth and then Evan abandons the acoustic guitar, taking some leads on the electric bass. The drums go on the attack and the song ends with David’s voice calling out “Hi Leo” as Leo Goya makes his entrance, for which we gave him credit. We were just becoming aware of “industrial music” at this time, so that’s the reference. We were intrigued by the ideas of industrial music, but were still tethered to our traditional instruments, hence the “acoustic” side.
LF:
Seems we started switching around pretty quickly this day, with me getting on Brad’s drum set and Brad playing my synthesizer. I was trying to make some interesting rhythms on the drums, but it was a struggle for me to keep going with whatever I started! Evan played an acoustic guitar (live, and overdubbed his bass), but he got this interesting, electric, metal-ly sounding sound out of it, thus the name of the piece. Playing the drums was a little easier once I got off the regular beat and started playing anything! Then Leo entered and we yelled "hi" to him and it was time to take a break, as announced by Evan….
“Vacation In Peking” (TDH)
EC:
This was Ed’s vehicle, although we probably didn’t know it at the time. Ed begins with a series of mellow chords and Evan plays a halting recorder solo. As the piece progresses, percussion dominates. Ed switches over to fuzz guitar, Evan picks up the bass and grooves with the drums. It morphs into a martial rhythm driven by Brad on the drums. Then the groove suddenly ends and Ed returns to the mellow opening theme, along with some synth and recorder before fading out. I probably titled it myself after-the-fact.
LF:
I think the “3-Tones” I played on “Vacation in Peking” were this little set of mini-toms brought by Brad, which added up to a lot of percussing, especially at the start! I think Ed got sole writing credit because he actually wrote his part, and the rest of us jammed along with it, including Evan on recorder, which he hadn’t played with WoG in a while. Shades of “Hot Tub in Tokyo”? I’m guessing this was the piece originally dubbed “Chinese Piece” on the reel box, making it our first effort of the day, which explains Leo’s non-involvement (he hadn’t arrived yet). I programmed my synthesizer to make this repeated descending high pitch in the background, which it did on its own while I was batting around on those 3-tone drums! (Y’know, I think these drums were called “5-tones” on earlier tapes, but two of the drum heads had broken by this point!) I start playing a simpler beat on a transition section that foreshadows Ed stomping on his Big Muff fuzz box! Then I try to work in a groove with Brad while Ed starts to wail and Evan has picked up his bass. Brad’s beat even goes military for a bit there, while I keep trying to play a complementary rhythm. Then it quiets down again and you hear Evan on recorder again and my programmed synth part comes through again and I adjust the synth to let that note linger a little longer and then turn it off, thinking the piece is ending as Ed returns to his more placid playing of the start of the jam. He might have kept going with that but the piece got faded down there regardless!
“Blue Leos/Black Hole In The Orifice” (TDH)
EC:
This is an intense epic jam, punctuated by taped mix-in materials. Evan is credited with rhythm guitar and tapes, but he clearly opens the proceedings with a walking bass line on the electric bass. Swooping sounds dominate, likely the tapes that Bob Forward sent us. Ed is playing lead guitar over the top of it all. There is a lot of percussion: Brad on drums, David on the “3-Tones” and Leo with his home-made devices. The bass line switches over to a free-styling solo, then hits a new groove. A loud voice comes on discussing “immutable laws” and then orgasm tapes that I had made through the wall at the Hall of Genius are mixed up.
The woman’s voice cries out “No!” and I had that repeated several times. This was a tape that I had made by placing a microphone to the locked door that led to a staircase descending to the basement apartment’s bedroom from our flat in the Hall of Genius. We had noticed that the couple in the basement had very loud sexual encounters, so I set up a microphone at the ready. Once we heard them get going, it was time for us to get silent and turn the recorder on. There’s a nice groove going along with the orgasm tapes.
The drum gets another groove going and is faded down while a radio announcer fades in, something about a book that might “create a disturbance”. Then the music is faded back at full blast. More announcer voices are mixed in, something about Channel 4 (a local TV station), then a snippet of some unidentified rock music, and more voices discussing an “honorary doctor of humanity” and the “mother’s womb”. Finally, Evan’s rhythm guitar comes in as he abandons the bass. Ed is still wailing away on lead. The announcer’s voice asks “is a fetus a creature?” alongside wild Ed lead guitar. “The Kingdom of God is at hand” announces the voice as the drums kick in with Evan’s death-metal rhythm groove. This is, I believe, the end of “Blue Leos” and the beginning of “Black Hole In The Orifice”. Both were my titles for this.
“Blue Leos” reflects my admiration for Leo and “Black Hole” reflects the doom-like minor-key death-metal riff I had come up with. More voices come along, something about the Olympics in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, some discussion of hockey teams, “a pretty good team”, Russia versus the NHL. There is discussion of “Health Care professionals” and something that “may save your life” and “1966 or 1967”. Evan takes lead guitar here with a herky jerky feedback-y solo. You hear crowds cheering at some athletic event while Evan’s lead guitar is blaring. Then he returns to the death-metal groove while a voice discusses “EPA restrictions”. The riff returns, this time with a clean guitar sound and a new groove is introduced. The piece fades out on an announcer talking about a hockey game. I really like this piece—the jam is super cool and the tapes mixed-in give it a surreal quality.
LF:
The next piece was the big finale, all out, no bars held, “everything but the kitchen sink” jam for the day. Evan credits himself with rhythm guitar, but I hear him playing bass at the start, which I think he played live for this (unlike the overdubbed bass on previous tracks of that day). I think Evan played bass when more in a jamming mode while his rhythm guitar (especially when acoustic) indicated more of an arty or controlled approach. Leo finally gets in on the act and you can hear his siren early on! I skip the synthesizer and just try to wail on the three-tone drums, though I do hear some slide whistle which sounds like me! Then the “tapes” come in. Naturally we’d been hearing a lot of use of tapes in the underground, particularly by Architects Office, with whom we’d been collaborating recently and who basically jammed to tapes that Joel Haertling had prepared ahead of time. And of course, Ed and Evan had used outside sound sources like baseball records and movie soundtracks since they started jamming together. But I think it was the phenomenon of tapes becoming a big thing throughout the underground that inspired Evan to add his own to this jam. This piece has all sorts, and there’s almost no rhyme nor reason to what was chosen, except that it was what struck Evan as the thing to do at the moment (or just happened to be on the radio?), and that’s how WoG usually worked!
Near the beginning you hear some orgasmic moans, which were actually not from any commercial or distributed sex tape (like the moaning heard on Side A) but rather the result of a recording we made of our downstairs neighbors! Hell, you couldn’t not hear them they were so loud (well, she was, anyway), so one night we pointed a microphone at the permanently locked door between our apartments and made a good tape of it! At one point she repeats “no, no, no”, and, um, well, I’ll leave that one there…. Then the “tapes” become recordings Evan randomly made off the radio. At one point, Evan mixed down the jam so you only hear the radio, and then reverses the roles, which makes it sound arty! At this point, I hear two guitar sounds, which may have been the result of Ed utilizing the feature of his Echoplex that allowed it to continuously play loops it had recorded while the guitar can continue to be played live. Brad can be heard to rave up the beat, which he liked to do, and now I think that is Evan playing rhythm guitar, in a bass-riff manner. We hear some religious radio talk and then some sports talk, and then the sound is again faded down temporarily to spotlight the radio talk (on Olympic hockey), and then we hear a commercial about health care and how to save your life! Later there’s a news report about the US military only being able to “sit and watch” as the Lebanese army got its ass kicked. Heh, under Reagan no less – is that even in the history books? Evan then plays his electric guitar in whole chords but starting from the high strings down, a technique he liked, a little reminiscent sounding to what he did on “Kristin Called,” and the jam fades out on this as we hear a hockey game broadcast taking over and then fading out as well….
BTW, I can’t say when “Blue Leos” turns into “Black Hole in the Orifice”; maybe when the tapes start? The former title obviously has something to do with our artist friend and participant Leo Goya (was he wearing blue that day, or was it just a Matisse reference and nothing else?) and the latter references (to the point of parody!) my “Black Hole in the Head” title from a prior tape release. You might notice that Evan originally wrote “black hole in the ass” on the reel box!
“Bell And Promises” (TDH)
LF:
After the “serious” jamming had ended, it was noticed that Ed’s Echoplex was continuing to play its loops, and so we had a good time playing all the percussion strewn about along with it, kind of a drum circle plus Echoplex loop. I’m sure Evan came up with the name, which sounded arty (something he wasn’t concerned with when naming “Black Hole in the Orifice”!). It starts to get really good with Evan’s pow-wow-esque chanting when it gets cut off, probably just for lack of time on the tape. I think we just noticed this material after we’d already mixed everything else onto the tape that we’d really wanted on it, so it was just “gravy” to get as much of this on the tape as we could. See, we could have made it an even longer tape had we been able to!!
EC:
The title escapes me. This is a short piece to fill out the end of the cassette. It features five guys doing percussion. It sounds like Ed’s Echoplex is going full blast very faintly in the background. Leo’s golf-ball-in-a-glass was obviously very close to the microphone. Evan chants a little, pow-wow style in the background, before the tape cuts off. o
LF:
Side B is entirely taken up by The Dry Heaves, which was a day long jam session with the whole gang, as it was at the time. Ed was there and so was Brad Carton, with his trap set. And even Leo Goya too, although he arrived a little late, after we’d already started…. Actually the first song on Side B was a cover, of the same song that starts out Side A, the classic “Louie, Louie.” I think there may have been a call-out to submit to some compilation that would be entirely versions of this song, so no wonder we tried it two entirely different ways! Evan leads the way as usual, this time on rhythm guitar, with the bass overdubbed later. I think I was supposed to sing it but maybe I didn’t come in quickly enough and Evan started singing, which cued me that I must have missed my cue and I picked it up from there! As usual I was trying to be as absurd as possible. I think I hear some voices in the background, which may have been overdubbed.
EC:
This is an actual rock band treatment, replete with Brad Carton on drums. Evan overdubbed bass after the fact. Fyodor is doing the lead vocal, but it’s obvious that we still don’t know any more words beyond the refrain. Nice lead guitar from Ed on this rockin’ track. The entire second side of the cassette is from one session with The Dry Heaves. This is the presumably “serious side” of the band, or at least the improvisatory side.
“Industrial Acoustic” (TDH)
EC:
Evan leads this with acoustic rhythm guitar. Brad Carton plays lead on synthesizer while David thumps away on the drums. Brad goes wild with the synth and then Evan abandons the acoustic guitar, taking some leads on the electric bass. The drums go on the attack and the song ends with David’s voice calling out “Hi Leo” as Leo Goya makes his entrance, for which we gave him credit. We were just becoming aware of “industrial music” at this time, so that’s the reference. We were intrigued by the ideas of industrial music, but were still tethered to our traditional instruments, hence the “acoustic” side.
LF:
Seems we started switching around pretty quickly this day, with me getting on Brad’s drum set and Brad playing my synthesizer. I was trying to make some interesting rhythms on the drums, but it was a struggle for me to keep going with whatever I started! Evan played an acoustic guitar (live, and overdubbed his bass), but he got this interesting, electric, metal-ly sounding sound out of it, thus the name of the piece. Playing the drums was a little easier once I got off the regular beat and started playing anything! Then Leo entered and we yelled "hi" to him and it was time to take a break, as announced by Evan….
“Vacation In Peking” (TDH)
EC:
This was Ed’s vehicle, although we probably didn’t know it at the time. Ed begins with a series of mellow chords and Evan plays a halting recorder solo. As the piece progresses, percussion dominates. Ed switches over to fuzz guitar, Evan picks up the bass and grooves with the drums. It morphs into a martial rhythm driven by Brad on the drums. Then the groove suddenly ends and Ed returns to the mellow opening theme, along with some synth and recorder before fading out. I probably titled it myself after-the-fact.
LF:
I think the “3-Tones” I played on “Vacation in Peking” were this little set of mini-toms brought by Brad, which added up to a lot of percussing, especially at the start! I think Ed got sole writing credit because he actually wrote his part, and the rest of us jammed along with it, including Evan on recorder, which he hadn’t played with WoG in a while. Shades of “Hot Tub in Tokyo”? I’m guessing this was the piece originally dubbed “Chinese Piece” on the reel box, making it our first effort of the day, which explains Leo’s non-involvement (he hadn’t arrived yet). I programmed my synthesizer to make this repeated descending high pitch in the background, which it did on its own while I was batting around on those 3-tone drums! (Y’know, I think these drums were called “5-tones” on earlier tapes, but two of the drum heads had broken by this point!) I start playing a simpler beat on a transition section that foreshadows Ed stomping on his Big Muff fuzz box! Then I try to work in a groove with Brad while Ed starts to wail and Evan has picked up his bass. Brad’s beat even goes military for a bit there, while I keep trying to play a complementary rhythm. Then it quiets down again and you hear Evan on recorder again and my programmed synth part comes through again and I adjust the synth to let that note linger a little longer and then turn it off, thinking the piece is ending as Ed returns to his more placid playing of the start of the jam. He might have kept going with that but the piece got faded down there regardless!
“Blue Leos/Black Hole In The Orifice” (TDH)
EC:
This is an intense epic jam, punctuated by taped mix-in materials. Evan is credited with rhythm guitar and tapes, but he clearly opens the proceedings with a walking bass line on the electric bass. Swooping sounds dominate, likely the tapes that Bob Forward sent us. Ed is playing lead guitar over the top of it all. There is a lot of percussion: Brad on drums, David on the “3-Tones” and Leo with his home-made devices. The bass line switches over to a free-styling solo, then hits a new groove. A loud voice comes on discussing “immutable laws” and then orgasm tapes that I had made through the wall at the Hall of Genius are mixed up.
The woman’s voice cries out “No!” and I had that repeated several times. This was a tape that I had made by placing a microphone to the locked door that led to a staircase descending to the basement apartment’s bedroom from our flat in the Hall of Genius. We had noticed that the couple in the basement had very loud sexual encounters, so I set up a microphone at the ready. Once we heard them get going, it was time for us to get silent and turn the recorder on. There’s a nice groove going along with the orgasm tapes.
The drum gets another groove going and is faded down while a radio announcer fades in, something about a book that might “create a disturbance”. Then the music is faded back at full blast. More announcer voices are mixed in, something about Channel 4 (a local TV station), then a snippet of some unidentified rock music, and more voices discussing an “honorary doctor of humanity” and the “mother’s womb”. Finally, Evan’s rhythm guitar comes in as he abandons the bass. Ed is still wailing away on lead. The announcer’s voice asks “is a fetus a creature?” alongside wild Ed lead guitar. “The Kingdom of God is at hand” announces the voice as the drums kick in with Evan’s death-metal rhythm groove. This is, I believe, the end of “Blue Leos” and the beginning of “Black Hole In The Orifice”. Both were my titles for this.
“Blue Leos” reflects my admiration for Leo and “Black Hole” reflects the doom-like minor-key death-metal riff I had come up with. More voices come along, something about the Olympics in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, some discussion of hockey teams, “a pretty good team”, Russia versus the NHL. There is discussion of “Health Care professionals” and something that “may save your life” and “1966 or 1967”. Evan takes lead guitar here with a herky jerky feedback-y solo. You hear crowds cheering at some athletic event while Evan’s lead guitar is blaring. Then he returns to the death-metal groove while a voice discusses “EPA restrictions”. The riff returns, this time with a clean guitar sound and a new groove is introduced. The piece fades out on an announcer talking about a hockey game. I really like this piece—the jam is super cool and the tapes mixed-in give it a surreal quality.
LF:
The next piece was the big finale, all out, no bars held, “everything but the kitchen sink” jam for the day. Evan credits himself with rhythm guitar, but I hear him playing bass at the start, which I think he played live for this (unlike the overdubbed bass on previous tracks of that day). I think Evan played bass when more in a jamming mode while his rhythm guitar (especially when acoustic) indicated more of an arty or controlled approach. Leo finally gets in on the act and you can hear his siren early on! I skip the synthesizer and just try to wail on the three-tone drums, though I do hear some slide whistle which sounds like me! Then the “tapes” come in. Naturally we’d been hearing a lot of use of tapes in the underground, particularly by Architects Office, with whom we’d been collaborating recently and who basically jammed to tapes that Joel Haertling had prepared ahead of time. And of course, Ed and Evan had used outside sound sources like baseball records and movie soundtracks since they started jamming together. But I think it was the phenomenon of tapes becoming a big thing throughout the underground that inspired Evan to add his own to this jam. This piece has all sorts, and there’s almost no rhyme nor reason to what was chosen, except that it was what struck Evan as the thing to do at the moment (or just happened to be on the radio?), and that’s how WoG usually worked!
Near the beginning you hear some orgasmic moans, which were actually not from any commercial or distributed sex tape (like the moaning heard on Side A) but rather the result of a recording we made of our downstairs neighbors! Hell, you couldn’t not hear them they were so loud (well, she was, anyway), so one night we pointed a microphone at the permanently locked door between our apartments and made a good tape of it! At one point she repeats “no, no, no”, and, um, well, I’ll leave that one there…. Then the “tapes” become recordings Evan randomly made off the radio. At one point, Evan mixed down the jam so you only hear the radio, and then reverses the roles, which makes it sound arty! At this point, I hear two guitar sounds, which may have been the result of Ed utilizing the feature of his Echoplex that allowed it to continuously play loops it had recorded while the guitar can continue to be played live. Brad can be heard to rave up the beat, which he liked to do, and now I think that is Evan playing rhythm guitar, in a bass-riff manner. We hear some religious radio talk and then some sports talk, and then the sound is again faded down temporarily to spotlight the radio talk (on Olympic hockey), and then we hear a commercial about health care and how to save your life! Later there’s a news report about the US military only being able to “sit and watch” as the Lebanese army got its ass kicked. Heh, under Reagan no less – is that even in the history books? Evan then plays his electric guitar in whole chords but starting from the high strings down, a technique he liked, a little reminiscent sounding to what he did on “Kristin Called,” and the jam fades out on this as we hear a hockey game broadcast taking over and then fading out as well….
BTW, I can’t say when “Blue Leos” turns into “Black Hole in the Orifice”; maybe when the tapes start? The former title obviously has something to do with our artist friend and participant Leo Goya (was he wearing blue that day, or was it just a Matisse reference and nothing else?) and the latter references (to the point of parody!) my “Black Hole in the Head” title from a prior tape release. You might notice that Evan originally wrote “black hole in the ass” on the reel box!
“Bell And Promises” (TDH)
LF:
After the “serious” jamming had ended, it was noticed that Ed’s Echoplex was continuing to play its loops, and so we had a good time playing all the percussion strewn about along with it, kind of a drum circle plus Echoplex loop. I’m sure Evan came up with the name, which sounded arty (something he wasn’t concerned with when naming “Black Hole in the Orifice”!). It starts to get really good with Evan’s pow-wow-esque chanting when it gets cut off, probably just for lack of time on the tape. I think we just noticed this material after we’d already mixed everything else onto the tape that we’d really wanted on it, so it was just “gravy” to get as much of this on the tape as we could. See, we could have made it an even longer tape had we been able to!!
EC:
The title escapes me. This is a short piece to fill out the end of the cassette. It features five guys doing percussion. It sounds like Ed’s Echoplex is going full blast very faintly in the background. Leo’s golf-ball-in-a-glass was obviously very close to the microphone. Evan chants a little, pow-wow style in the background, before the tape cuts off. o
listing from the fourth WoG catalog, The Face Of The Fiend
Walls Of Genius profile in the "W" issue of Op Magazine, 1984.
